Yes, my no-longer-little boy is headed off to university. It is certainly a bittersweet moment. But as Cathie said, it would be a lot worse if we weren’t so confident that he is completely ready to go. He is so much more grounded and mature than I was at 17.

On the sci-fi front, by pure luck I managed to save the best for last. I loved Weapons of Choice. It was by far and away the best of the five books on the list. The difference, however, was not its vision of the future as compelling as it was. John Birmingham is just simply a great writer. The quality of the characters, their development and the prose is just head and shoulders above the others.

To be honest, I had seen the book in bookstores several times but had just never bought it. It seemed too close to Harry Turtledove‘s Worldwar series which I had read a few years back. I’ve ordered the nexttwo books in Birmingham’s trilogy. But so far, I like it a lot better than WorldWar.

I found this comment in the Wikipedia article on Weapons of Choice baffling:

Weapons of Choice has been both hailed and criticized by members of the alternate history community. Some believe it to over-emphasize the racism and sexism of the 1942 Allies, to the point of their being barely morally superior to the Axis.

I thought he got the views and social mores of the time exactly right. The US Navy really was all-white in WW II. Racism and segregation was the order of the day. But to say that his writing implied a moral equivalence between the Allies and the Axis seems wildly overblown.

It is chilling to think that a mere 80 years separated the two societies portrayed in the book. The characters from 2021 might have been human, but truthfully, this book has its roots in the alien encounter genre. Highly recommended.